Gaming

Coverage of current events and announcements in the world of board games, card games, RPGs, miniature gaming, video games, and any other kind of gaming, with an emphasis of focus on the local MN gaming scene.

The games I most enjoy playing are the ones that can inspire players’ imagination with a story that unfolds over the course of a session. Quality and consistent artwork, thematic gameplay, and resonance with the audience’s pop-culture experiences are all elements through which a game can deliver a story experience in which the players feel they are a part of the fictional world where the game takes place. Role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder are the most straightforward example of this,...

As Western appeal toward visual novels, the traditionally Japanese genre of interactive electronic stories, continues to grow, so too do Western developers’ interests in bringing these kinds of games to their fans. Canada-based Sad Panda Studios, creator of the popular visual novel Crush Crush, is currently raising funds via Kickstarter for the production of a “bigger, bolder, bustier!” follow-up game, Hush Hush. Crush Crush is an irreverent, popular-culture-riffing romp through the world of the dating sim, a visual-novel subcategory in which...

In CompoundIt!, a board game created by Minneapolis science teacher Andrew Lyman-Buttler, chemistry and Scrabble-like mechanics join hands to create a uniquely geeky experience. The game—which is running a crowdfunding campaign through May 2, 2018—is billed as a “chemistry formula word game in which the ‘letters’ are chemical elements and the ‘words’ are compounds.” It challenges players to build binary compounds and polyatomic ions on the board from tiles representing individual elements. Lyman-Buttler describes his game as a “great new...

This year marks the 25th anniversary of Magic: The Gathering, which was first revealed at the 1993 Origins Game Fair, held on Independence Day weekend in Fort Worth, Texas. For an entire generation, the trading-card game has kept a huge following, and now it’s time for veteran players to relive the fond memories they’ve had surrounding Magic and for new players to join the Magic community and see what all the fuss is about. It’s been known for a while now...

Ari Carrillo, who works as “President of Visuals and Playtime” as one-half of DevNAri, describes the developer duo’s game Newt One as a 3D musical platformer, but that’s just the elevator pitch. What the Minnesota developers are working to prove in their first title goes beyond this formula—the real goal is to make you, the player, just a little bit happier from playing. “The thing that we’re trying to do with it is elicit the emotion of happiness,” said...

Minnesota, and particularly the Twin Cities area, is a great place for gamers. Maybe it’s all the time we spend indoors due to the weather, or maybe it’s just a natural evolution of the fan culture that has thrived here for over 50 years, but it’s difficult to do a perception check above zero without detecting another gamer. There are so many gaming events here all year round that it can be difficult to keep track of them all! Fortunately for...

In 1981 the world was introduced to Galaga. The game is synonymous with the classic arcade setup: the flashing lights, the adrenaline, the 8-bit music, the euphoric trance of just one more game. Understanding and craving that nostalgia were the local developers of Slackerz Inc., who created an homage to Galaga called Galactic Battleground—fittingly housed in full arcade-cabinet glory. The key difference, though, is the way the game is played through its core PvP mechanic. “Galactic Battleground is best...

I’m the first to say that I’m a noob when it comes to Dungeons & Dragons. I have only participated in one one-shot campaign, which allowed me to create Mr. Waffles the ultimate cat/lion killing machine. But I’m always looking for new opportunities to participate in a another one-shot or play D&D weekly, so I’ve put together this guide of local meetups for anyone else who’s trying to find the perfect role-playing group. Before I get into the Twin Cities D&D...

When someone picks up a 12-sided die, the popular imagination generally links it with a Dungeon Master’s Guide and tales of swords and sorcery rather than spacesuits and starships, an image crystallized among the general public by Weezer, Stranger Things, Freaks and Geeks, and more. But science fiction has been a part of role-playing games since the 1970s with James M. Ward’s Metamorphosis Alpha, among other systems, and local group Saturday Night Space Opera has been providing a space...

Despite my love of games, I’ve been on zombie burnout for the better part of a decade. I feel like if I were to blindfold myself, spin around three times, and throw a dart from the middle of a tabletop game shop—not that I would ever think of doing such a horrendous thing—if I didn’t hit a game about dueling wizards, it would probably be some kind of zombie-themed game. That market saturation has left me feeling worn out...